February 22, 2012 meeting

The Michigan Movie Makers have gotten together for the last 8 months. Although we’ve got a big name, we are mostly from northwest lower Michigan – Petoskey, Traverse City, Benzie and Manistee counties. Meeting face to face is currently our most important practice, although we do maintain a web site and have a growing email list.

We regularly have between 15-30 people at our monthly meetings, with about 10 core facilitators. There are certainly more than 30 movie makers in the region, so how can M3 be more inclusive? Can M3 become a vital resource to regional productions? How do we make our meetings more magnetic?

Ours is an ad hoc organization, it’s mostly been about finding a space and gathering, with some minimal curating by the core facilitators. Last Wednesday we imagined doing a little more – structuring the meetings and scheduling compelling content to share. Rather than form a steering committee, (a process that fizzled early on), we’re going to enhance this group by emphasizing creative autonomy. Upcoming meetings will be curated by individuals from our pool of core facilitators.

The guidelines are simple – each presentation within the main meeting should be no longer than ~35 minutes, unless we’ve got a visiting VIP (on the level of Sam Raime or Michael Moore).
All meetings will feature the following…

at the start…
• at the curators discretion, brief Introductions around the room (6:30 pm – 6:40 pm) OR
• Introductions slide show (eventually) while folks are arriving (6:00 – 6:45 pm)
• Who’s Got News? (6:40 pm – 7:00 pm)

at the end, concurrently…
• Mingle and Networking – either in the theater, adjacent gallery or across the sidewalk at Right Brain Brewery. (8:00 pm – whenever)
• Open Projector – commandeer the laptop and projector with a flash drive, HD or DVD to show snippets for inspiration, discussion, critique. We also have a fast connection to the web. (8:00 pm – whenever)

Here’s our upcoming schedule of curators and hosts for the next 6 months.

March 28 – Andrea Claire Maio
April 25 – Jeffrey Morgan
May 23 – Rebecca Glotfelty
June 27 –
July 25 (Micro Movie Marathon) – Dan Kelly
August 1 (M3 TCFF Party?) –
August 22 –
September 26 –
October 24 –
November 28 –
December 19 (Year in Review, end of the world) –
January 23, 2013 (Micro Movie Marathon) – Dan Kelly
February 27 –

We’ve got some needs – homework!

Dan Kelly has promised to equip the theater with the appropriate cabling to drive the projector from a laptop and find a biggish whiteboard.

Who can document the main meeting (6:30 pm – 8:00 pm) and post on M3’s YouTube channel? If nothing else, the clear audio alone would be very nice for a podcast. Is anyone willing to step up and take responsibility for handling this consistently every month?

Scott Tompkins wants to start collecting money to cover the rental expenses for the  Inside Out Gallery, snacks and whatever else we’re paying for. Eventually, we’d like someone to step up and handle funds in a more structured fashion so we can implement some sort of membership.

We need curators! If you’ve been coming to meetings pretty regularly then you’re eligible to curate / host a meeting. See the schedule above for available months.

We’re going to start a very simple introduction page at MichiganMovieMakers.com.  EVERYONE – please sign up for the blog and then create a post that includes the following…

Name
Picture (400×400 pix minimum, jpeg best quality. Please, no ratty low rez photos)
Contact (phone number and email)
Village, Town, City, etc.
Links (up to 3)
Bio (1-2 sentences or 144 characters max)

Alternately, send an email to Dan Kelly m3 [AT] michigan movie makers [DOT] com.